For a particular brand of TF2ber comment section dweller, Gigantic was a golden goose. For years, you'd hear whispered tales of a mythical shooter that was everything the community had ever wanted. A game with an infinite skill ceiling, euphoric movement, a colourful cartoony personality, and a perfect midway between the flashy abilities of Overwatch and the customisability of Paladins with legitimate accessibility for both the competitive and casual scenes. It was the perfect game. But most of us (Heathens) were blinded by humanity's ego and allowed this perfect artefact of humankind to crumble into the aether, destined to exist only in the squalor of secret community LAN matches and seedy dive bar discord servers.

Egads, the Son of man returns! While I am no longer the kind of hero shooter acolyte itching for this game's revival, my younger brother is, and he shattered glass with the screams of excitement when he found out this was coming back. How could I not join in? Immediately, my eyebrows were raised by a few things. Gearbox has somehow got their name on this now. Abstraction Games are 'developing,' probably in the same way they developed Baldur's Gate 3 by helping with the Steam version and then plastering it on their website's front page. The original creators, Motiga, are nowhere to be found. Their name isn't on the game at all. Interviews indicate some of them had a small advisory role in this project. Still, I've found no evidence they'll be receiving compensation for their work in, you know, making the game, so hopefully, this kind of post-mortem revival project doesn't become normal. It is a situation pungent with the scent of an executive getting too excited about social media analytics and the quick buck he believes could be acquired. The continued server issues do not help the case.

But the real story here is none of this. I played this game for the first time yesterday. This shit is a fucking MOBA! How could you guys lie to me like this for years? Gigantic originally shut down in July 2018, and for over half a decade, people told me how exciting of a hero shooter it was and how it revolutionised movement shooters as a genre! It's a fucking MOBA! You sit there in a shitty team fight, and everyone sprays everyone else with multi-coloured goo, and the people who've played the game before run away, and the people who actually want to have fun die. Like every other fucking MOBA! I have been the target of one of the longest and most effective psyops in history and I am distraught!

If Valorant represents the hero shooter at one extreme, Gigantic sits at the other: it is primarily a MOBA with shooter elements, more in a line with a traditional League of Legends or DoTA 2 experience than anything like Overwatch, Paladins or Apex Legends. Because of the massive burst damage and CC potential of the melee units, you get that tight negotation of space so emblematic of traditional MOBAs: players engaging in passive stare downs, waiting for the slightest perceptible opening to pounce. A high stakes game of chicken where there is just a hairs breadth between "overextending" into certain death or confirming a kill. In contrast, the ranged characters play and feel like your more traditional hero shooter fare, but the power that would come with so much map control has been heavily nerfed to compensate. Primary fire damage is low, time to kill is obscenely high, and everything revolves around disengagement and cooldowns. There's no creeps to farm, but the movement and mechanics are undoubtedly MOBA.

But these concepts don't translate as well as they probably should. I noted it in this game's Korean cousin, Storm Strikers, as well; this game's readability is complete trash. The time to kill being so high, you just get a crowd of characters wailing on eachother, spamming cooldowns with very little thought. Bright colors flash all over the screen, giant AOES of no discernible origin cover the ground, and giant white letters pop up to say "FROZEN. ARMOR BROKEN. SLOWED. POISONED. VOID GRIPPED." It's just graphical vomit, the kind people will tell you "Don't worry bro, it all makes sense after 1000 hours bro, I swear bro." Be that as it may, the problem with these games is player retention, and it doesn't have the benefit of the older MOBAs long-running communities to fall back on. New players are not going to know what is killing them, how fast and why. It might be novel while everyone plays with the new toy; but as the playerbase wanes and the skill gap widens this is going to be a problem. Just ask Storm Strikers with its 10 daily players.

As a long time player of these titles, I know good concepts when I see them, and Gigantic has some really strong points in its favor. The game has great pacing in the current "Rush" mode and I feel like it rewards both game sense and high mechanical skill equitably. I can see why this game had a diehard community, and it's satisfying to see these players get their game back in the era of GaaS. Many of my favorite MOBAs and hero shooters are gone for good, casualties of a mix of bad marketing and corporate greed. I never even got to play Gigantic before it got hit with the end of service announcement. Now that I've finally played it, I can see both why its loved and why it was canned.

Games like this need to focus on player retention, especially if they are paid titles. So the developers undoubtedly have their work cut out for them. Framerate optimization, server stability and UI fixes stand out as the most important pain points; but the new user onboarding has to also be drastically improved. Then it is a matter of making sure those players stay onboard- and the answer is never a battle pass or balance patches. What we need to see out of Gigantic is alternate ways to play the game- as these sorts of options are appeal to casual userbases. Different gamemodes are an important part of the hero shooter ecosystem because they allow for healthier player seperation. Let the tryhards dominate modes with more competitive depth, but give the normal players a low-stakes gamemode where they can just relax and turn their brains off.

As it is, Gigantic feels doomed to fail, but all hope is not lost if the developers have been paying as close attention to the industry as the players have.